


Heart Out of Place

by sphilia



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Cunnilingus, M/M, Sexual Content, Vaginal Fingering, can't help being a libra!, daud and the outsider are both trans so let's just get that out of the way, guys will capriciously ignore you and vanish from your life for decades at a time, post-Death of the Outsider, then be like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 15:24:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21138911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sphilia/pseuds/sphilia
Summary: Daud whispered a name in the Outsider’s ear, and the Void lost its god. His very last mark on history. Until it wasn’t.What are an old man and an older god to do with their second shots at life?





	Heart Out of Place

If he tries, Daud can remember what it felt like to dissolve. He doesn't remember what it was like in between, after his soul scattered in the Void, before Billie took the human Outsider by the hand and guided him out of the Void, before the Outsider turned back one last time, reached into the darkness, and yanked Daud with him.

When they returned to the physical world, there were three of them. Daud remembers that. Remembers Billie's pinched expression, looking at him. She insisted on taking him to a doctor, this time. No more dying on an uncomfortable ship's cot, rotting in his own anger and despair. The Outsider shrugged, said _The killing wounds will be gone, just like mine_, but didn't insist when Billie told him to shut up.

Daud endured a few days of letting Billie's doctor poke and prod him, then told her to stop fussing like a mother. Billie told him to get his ass back in bed or she'd throw him out the window.

Once Billie pried the window open and had him slung over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, Daud found it wisest to agree to stay one more night.

He stayed two more, and told himself it was only because Billie controlled all the funds. He could have stolen money for a room, but the thought made him twice as aware of every ache and twinge in his body, reminded him of every heavy year on his shoulders. It didn't make a difference, anyway. The only thing ailing him were aching old bones and memories of the tender mercies of the Eyeless. Nothing a bandage could fix, whatever Billie insisted.

The Outsider gave no opinion. The Outsider didn't come to see him once during his convalescence. Daud put it out of his mind. Continues to put it out of his mind now that he's finally holed up in an inn room, at last free of foul-smelling ointments greased on his old bruises and clucking disapproval every time he wants to stretch his legs.

Clearly, the Outsider has no more interest in Daud—or in explaining himself to him—than he did in Daud's first lifetime. In hindsight, it was idiotic to think that anything would change between the two of them, just because everything else had.

All these years, and he still makes Daud a fool.

Billie would tell him not to brood, but Billie isn't here to stop him, and there's little else to occupy him in the small, neat room. So he broods, until it starts to feel embarrassingly like moping, and then he tries to read the trite few novels stacked haphazardly on the bedside table, reclining against his pillows and squinting at the words until a headache starts to bloom in his temples. The Eyeless didn't bother to save his reading glasses, and after Billie got him out, well. They both knew he was dying. No point. Daud throws the worn penny dreadful away from him in disgust, grimly satisfied with the solid thunk when it hits the wall.

The questioning knock from the other side of the wall takes him by surprise. He hasn’t given any thought to his possible neighbors; maybe it’s Billie, keeping an eye on him. Maybe an annoyed stranger.

He shouldn't be as stunned as he is, he supposes, to see the Outsider peer through his door a moment later.

"The door was locked," Daud says stupidly.

"Billie gave me a key," the Outsider says, closing the door behind him. "In case you... fell. Her choice of words were less kind."

He sounds so… normal. Daud should be disgusted, he thinks, to see his… to see him so diminished. He doesn't know what he feels. Trapped, maybe. Numb. Frozen to the bed beneath him.

The Outsider studies the discarded book on the floor with casual curiosity.

"The reading on offer not to your liking?" His new, pale eyes don't see through him the way they used to, but Daud still feels pierced by them. Like a moth under pins. "Oh. You get headaches without your glasses. I'll get you a new pair tomorrow."

"Why?" Daud's voice comes out hoarse. He curses his weakness.

The Outsider blinks slowly. "I know your prescription. You're on bed rest. Billie wouldn't forgive me for sending you out alone."

"Why did you bring me back."

Daud grits his teeth against the answering silence, forces himself to meet the Outsider's eyes, bright and blank.

"Are you sure that's the question you want to ask me?" The Outsider sighs, and the disappointment Daud imagines he can hear in that sound burns his insides like fire.

"So sorry it doesn't suit you," Daud snaps. "If I'm boring you, you can leave."

"You don't mean that," the Outsider says, and the knowing little smile on his lips is so much like the god he no longer is. "You never do."

"You're still as much of a bastard as ever," Daud grinds out between clenched teeth.

The Outsider has the audacity to look surprised. As if he thought the transformation he's gone through would have overwritten his rotten personality with something brand new. Maybe Daud did, too.

"But not black-eyed," he says softly. Idly, with thoughtless confidence, he invites himself to perch on the edge of Daud's bed. The expression on his face fits him badly, Daud thinks, too open, too... uncontrolled. Like he's been wearing a mask for so many years that he never had to learn to keep his thoughts off his face.

"Billie says I'll need a name," the Outsider says, as if being insulted by Daud reminded him. "What would you call me?"

"Oh no," Daud grunts, sinking back against his pillows. "I'm not giving you a name. I'm not that stupid."

The bastard looks surprised again. "You've already given me one appellation. Why not another?"

"It was an insult, not a name. Ask Corvo to name you when you get to Dunwall. I'm sure he'll be jumping for joy to provide anything you ask."

"Why would I be going to Dunwall?"

The Outsider is tormenting him on purpose, Daud is sure of it. Forcing him to participate in his own humiliation. 

"Corvo has resources. And he's your _favorite_."

The Outsider puts a hand on Daud's thigh, and looks at him with those pale, pale eyes, a slight smile playing in the corner of his lips.

"Corvo has an empire to run. A daughter he can't admit needs no more raising. He has no time to pay attention to yet another charge in his care."

“He’d make time for you.”

“He has little of that to spare.”

Daud stares at him, dumbfounded, slowly putting the pieces together.

"You don't want to share him," he says, disbelieving. "If you can't have all of him, you don't want any of him, is that it?"

"I wouldn't put it that way."

"Oh really? I thought you didn't lie?"

The Outsider huffs, ruffled in a way that’s impossibly endearing, or maybe just impossible.

“When I was a god, I could see anything, anywhere. When I became bored, I left. You know that better than anyone.” Daud takes the insult in silence. Just another one for the pile. “Now, my reality ends at what’s right in front of me. What do you imagine my life would be like in Dunwall Tower? Can you picture me living by the strictures of a castle’s daily schedule, every hour planned a month in advance?”

“I doubt you’d be important enough to have your own schedule,” Daud grunts. But he takes the point. Void forbid the Outsider experience boredom a single moment of his life.

"I would if I were the Royal Protector's lover." The Outsider watches him; Daud wishes he had just stabbed him. It would be less painful. "That is what you're imagining, right? Me, hanging on his arm like a trophy. Or do you prefer to picture me as Corvo's private concubine? Holed up and waiting for whatever fleeting moments he can spare me? A dirty little secret, like he once was to Jessamine?"

"Alright," Daud bites out. His hands have balled into fists, he doesn't know when. "_Alright_, you've made your point. What is your plan, then? At least tell me that much."

"I suppose that depends," the Outsider says mildly, infuriatingly vague. "What do you plan to do, Daud?"

Daud meets his bland gaze with suspicion, then horrified realization, as several things click into place.

"Tyvia," he says quickly. "You'd hate the cold."

"I might get used to it," the Outsider counters, all innocence.

"Right." Sarcasm coats Daud's tongue like a protective layer. "You, knitting in front of the fireplace, making soups in the kitchen. How domestic."

The Outsider's smile is so, so mild, so infuriating. "You can make the soups," he allows. "I might take to knitting."

“You won’t, because you’re not coming with me,” Daud scowls.

"Daud." His name, in the Outsider's mouth. Daud's lungs feel full of salt water. The Outsider smiles.

"Once, I placed your hand on the lever that moves the world." The Outsider reaches for him, and Daud bats his hand away as if it will burn him. "But you, you had your eyes on a different prize.

"And now you won't claim it?"

"I don't want it," Daud says, the lie pathetically limp on his numb tongue.

"You do. I am your heart's desire."

"Why are you doing this?"

The Outsider looks, if such a thing is possible, _peeved_.

"There was a time when you wouldn't have questioned this," he says, almost petulantly.

"Yeah? I changed. You changed me." Daud's lips thin in a bitter grimace. "You didn't have the time of day for me for three decades. Not even in the last week. Why now? Bored of the charms of mortality already?"

The look in the Outsider's eyes speaks of nothing good, all calculation. "I didn't think you'd want to do this in front of Billie's friend."

"Do what? What is it we're doing? What are you trying to do?"

"Right now, I'm trying to seduce you."

His words might almost pass for the unshakeable confidence of an omniscient creature if not for the slight pout on his lips. As if a pout will silence Daud into compliance. Something bitter and burning constricts Daud's throat.

The bastard hasn't changed at all. Neither has Daud. And he doesn't say a word of protest when the Outsider climbs into his lap and settles there. Almost without thinking, Daud sets his hands at the small of his back. Secure and steady. What he wouldn't have given—did give—to touch the Outsider like this in his youth.

"I tried to kill you." Daud's voice is a quiet rumble under the Outsider’s hands on his chest.

"You were thinking of me. You have been thinking of me, always, since you were a young boy and I kissed your left hand in your dreams."

"Fuck you." The Outsider doesn't respond, and Daud can't abide the silence for long. "There are hundreds of zealots who would give their right arm to have you. Thousands."

"Dear Daud." The large hands circling the Outsider’s narrow waist tighten dangerously, but the Outsider leans in, heedless, crowding Daud with cruel ease. "I think you overestimate how many people have ever had the audacity to fall in love with me."

Heat rises up Daud's neck, and his jaw tightens until it creaks.

"What do you _want_," he asks, again, and his useless hands feel like weights, helplessly settling on the Outsider’s hips as if he has the right. Any right at all.

"What do I want," the Outsider echoes slowly. “I wonder. I feel as if I’ve been thinking of nothing else, these past days.”

"So? Is it that you don't know, or do you just want to make me say it?"

"Would you?" The Outsider sounds almost naively eager. "Will you say it, Daud?"

"You're human now. You'll never command attention again just by popping your damn head out of the Void the way you used to. You didn't even _like_ your worshipers, but now that you'll never hold the fate of another person's life in your hands again… You're afraid. You’re afraid of being what the rest of us were to you, all these years. You’re afraid of being nothing."

The Outsider's eyes are blank and shiny, like the surface of a storm-grey sea. Revealing nothing of their depths.

"That's why you want me," Daud says, and it feels like sacrilege, like ash on his tongue. "You need to know that someone still—" His throat closes around the words, silences him.

“Say it.” That voice—when has Daud ever been able to resist a command from that voice, however cruel, or cold, or taunting? There's nothing cold about the Outsider now.

“You need to know that someone still needs your teeth around their organs," Daud says, and his voice is dead, but his hands are warm and heavy on the Outsider's hips.

"Your words," says the Outsider, his skin heating under Daud's, "Not mine."

His lips are warm against Daud’s. Alive. Possessive. Daud exhales against his mouth, pitifully open and pliant under the Outsider’s demands.

Warm hands roam his chest, push his shirt up to run exploring strokes up his firm, muscled torso—he's old now, and worn, but his strength was the one thing the Eyeless cared to preserve.

He should do something, should return the Outsider's touches, but Daud feels frozen, paralyzed before the prospect of laying his clumsy hands on this body, on this creature, of all creatures.

Person. On this person.

The decision is taken from him when the Outsider reaches for his hands and guides him, patiently, through undressing him. Daud fumbles, clumsy, with the Outsider's buttons, but he couldn't possibly deny him—even if he wanted to. The Outsider reveals himself to Daud, and Daud thinks that he must be the first person to see this, all this soft flesh preserved for so many thousands of years in a cage of stone in the Void. He can't possibly be worthy, but oh, he wants this. Has wanted this for as long as he has been able to want anything.

The Outsider is resplendent and nude in his lap, and Daud is stunned all over again. Everywhere his skin is pressed against Daud's feels electric. Daud is afraid of all the things he wants to do to that skin.

The Outsider presses a kiss to the corner of Daud's mouth, shameless in its demand. Slender fingers work at the buttons of his trousers. His hand feels clumsy, wrapping around the Outsider's.

"No," he says hoarsely. "Not that."

"And why not?" The Outsider looks at him with a black smile. "You're not uncomfortable with being touched. You left insecurity behind a long time ago."

It's different, Daud doesn't bother to say. This isn't a warm, transient body, here one day, forgotten the next. Never remaining in his thoughts or his dreams.

This is you. It was only ever you.

The Outsider slips out from between Daud's numb fingers like morning fog, and the buttons part, his slim fingers brush through thick, coarse curls. The sound that wrings itself out of Daud's throat is quiet, wet and broken. Hitches, when a slender digit finds him slick.

The Outsider feeds it to him, expression bright and impish, and that feels better. Grounding. Better cruelty than tender touches that flay him bare to the bone, leave him naked in his sincerity.

The Outsider's tongue is warm, lapping at the remains of salt and wet on Daud's lower lip. He lets Daud close the gap and kiss him, only inhales, once, when Daud lifts him bodily, arranges slender, unmarred thighs over his own broad, scarred shoulders.

Daud doesn't look at the Outsider's face when he presses a kiss to his belly, but he can vividly imagine the smug expression that must surely be there. If he looks into the Outsider's eyes, he'll start thinking about the enormity of this—of being allowed to touch all this expanse of perfect, unmarked, adored skin—and he knows that he'll go mad. Maybe he already has. It seems likely.

The Outsider's hands rest in Daud's hair, and Daud buries his nose in impossibly soft black pubes, kisses the Outsider's labia like he's afraid to kiss his mouth; tender, adoring, desiring.

The Outsider's cunt is hot and wet, and the proof of the Outsider's want feels like a leash wrapped around Daud's neck, could choke him just as well. Above him, the Outsider squirms under the blunt, artless strokes of Daud's broad tongue. He grows wetter. So does Daud's chin. An accidental brush of teeth against his clit makes the Outsider tense up like a wire, and Daud is too distracted trying to repeat the feat to take much notice of the Outsider's twisting his knee under him until he's half kneeling of Daud's shoulders, and when his fingers tighten in Daud's hair, Daud can only moan in belated realization before the Outsider's beautiful cunt rises and _grinds_ against him with demanding intent, and all he can do is take it, desperately offer his tongue and his mouth to be used. He could die, just like this, just for this moment to have his— his— to have the Outsider. Just this.

The Outsider shudders and pants above him, stills, and whines, high and shocked, when Daud sweeps his tongue across his swollen clit.

Daud eases them down slowly, arms aching, until he's lying on his back with the Outsider perched on his chest, bright and naked, soaking a patch of saliva and bodily fluids into Daud's shirt. Daud closes his eyes against the Outsider's pale gaze. Limbs shift, and warm lips flutter against Daud's tacky, fluid-stained jaw, so quickly that it could have been a trick of the imagination.

Daud doesn't stop the hands that tug his unbuttoned trousers the rest of the way off, nor the knees that nudge his broad thighs apart. As long as his eyes stay closed, the fingers that dance through the thick curls over his sex are just a dream. They dip between his swollen lips, find him impossibly, humiliatingly slick. The Outsider runs his fingers through Daud's wetness, and, without preamble, presses a finger inside him. A second finger joins the first, fingerfucks him slow and sure, and Daud's senses narrow until nothing in the world exist except the intrusion inside him, stretching his walls in unfamiliar ways. His breath hitches when a third finger prods at his entrance, but it's too much, and the digit drops away.

Without warning, the Outsider's free hand attacks his clit, wets it with his own slick, rolls it between thumb and forefinger. Daud's thighs spread farther apart without his say-so, his hips only kept from bucking by desperate fear of dislodging the digits inside him. His jaw hangs slack, lets every pitiful noise emerge from his throat without obstruction. He's been ready for so long. The Outsider's hot breath washes over his clit, and his thumb twists just so, and Daud comes apart, shaking while the Outsider circles his clit through his climax.

Daud feels boneless, breathless.

"Daud," the Outsider commands softly. "Look at me."

Daud opens his eyes. The Outsider kneels between Daud's thighs like he belongs there, hands drenched in Daud's slick.

The Outsider holds Daud's gaze, and presses the third finger into his now relaxed, yielding entrance. Daud feels wide open for him.

"How much of me do you think you could take with practice?" The Outsider's tone is even, measured. Deliberately conversational. "My fist? I think you could."

Daud clenches around him, once, and the Outsider pulls out of him with a quiet laugh. Wipes the worst of the mess on his hands onto Daud's already soiled shirt. Laughs again at Daud's quiet grumbling.

He flops down on the bed next to Daud, one arm draped over Daud’s chest with all the right of ownership, and Daud doesn’t have the—heart, willpower, strength—to object.

“So,” the Outsider murmurs, his breath tickling the shell of Daud’s ear. “Tyvia?”

“Tyvia’s cold as balls,” Daud grumbles. “Let’s stay in Serkonos.”

“And here I was looking forward to trying your soups.”

Daud huffs, not quite mustering up irritation. “Serkonos has soups.”

“And you’ll make them for me?”

“If I say yes, will you stop talking about soup?”

The Outsider laughs, and the sound is light and entirely human. Daud’s chest feels full of air, fit to burst. Maybe he’ll wake up, and find that this was all a dream, like the ones he used to have when he was much younger and still desperately hurt by his deity’s silence. Maybe it never really stopped. The hurt, or the dreams.

The Outsider’s teeth scrap his earlobe, and it feels entirely real.

“Stop thinking, Daud,” the Outsider commands, and Daud—Daud obeys.

* * *

_Another day, another time, a late night conversation:_

"You know this isn't going to be forever. This—whatever you did to me—it's a temporary measure. You're going to outlive me."

“Am I?”

“You have to. Or else, what was any of this for?”

"What is anyone's life for? I'll live, for a while, and then I'll die. As will you. Wasn't that the point? No more immortality?"

"..."

"Daud."

"I don't like that."

"Go to sleep, Daud. I won't die tonight, and neither will you."


End file.
